Planning for 2025: Segmentation and Journey Mapping

By Kristen Hayer

Welcome to article two in my series on Planning for 2025. Before you start in on this week’s topic of segmenting your customers and mapping your customer journey, you should have a clear view of your strategic goals for the coming year. Here’s a link to last week’s post to help you out. Once your goals for the coming year are sorted, you should move on to making sure your segmentation and customer journey are updated and clearly mapped. Here’s how I like to approach this effort.

1. Segment Your Customers

While it is nice to think that every customer should have the same journey, in reality it doesn’t meet the specific needs of unique groups of customers, and it certainly doesn’t scale. That being said, you shouldn’t have more than 2-4 customer segments. You’re going to want a different journey for each segment, so if you have more than 4 segments it can get pretty tough to manage. In order to determine customer segments, you want to consider groups of customers by both the revenue they contribute to your company (some people use revenue tiers or price points) and specific behavior patterns they share. Unique behavior patterns could be caused by things like the vertical they are in, the number of employees they have, or their level of technical expertise. If you need a little help building out your customer segments, we have both a class and a service for that!

2. Evaluate the Current Customer Journey

Even if you have never formally mapped your customer journey, you have one. Write down the path that a typical customer goes through. What does onboarding look like, step-by-step? What touchpoints are in place to encourage customers to adopt your solutions? How are CSMs asked to stay in touch and build customer relationships? What happens when a customer contacts support? How do renewals happen? Write down each step in the customer journey and guess what, you have a journey map! Now, take some time to think about where customers get stuck in your current journey. Where they get frustrated.

Where internal teams get frustrated with customers. With each other. Write these down as well, and you have a list of things to address with a refreshed customer journey. And again, if you don’t feel confident, we have a class and a service that can help!

3. Map your 2025 Customer Journeys

For each segment of your customer base, design a new customer journey that addresses the challenges you identified in step two. It might mean bringing in a CSM sooner, adding steps to the onboarding process, streamlining the number of touchpoints that happen mid-year, or automating aspects of your current journey. Be open to a variety of approaches.

The main things to remember in this step are that you should: 1. Provide a journey that fits the revenue each group of customers is generating for your company, 2. Meet the specific customer needs each group of customers has and 3. In every case, provide a great customer experience. Creativity is key here. To help with this project, I would recommend making this a group effort. When we facilitate customer journey development efforts, we include the Sales, Services, Support and Success teams, along with any other groups who manage customer-facing parts of the journey.

In a perfect world, you’ll just have to adjust existing segmentation and journey plans to make sure they still align with your customer base and objectives for 2025. If you don’t have segmentation or journey maps in place, you’ll need to do a little more work. This effort is worth it, however, since the rest of your planning for next year should flow from this foundation.

Some of you, however, might face active resistance from other teams in your company. Here are ideas on how to tackle some common sources of opposition:

What if…

• Your marketing and sales team are working from a different segmentation plan?
  
  It is totally fine (and frankly, normal) if your segments differ from your sales and marketing team’s segments, or Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Remember, they are operating on a go-forward plan. You still need to work with groups of legacy customers who don’t match the ICP. Trust me, your leadership team doesn’t want to lose all of those legacy customers all at once, so you need a plan for how to work with them. By explaining this to your sales, marketing and leadership teams, you’ll find that resistance to your segmentation plan will typically fade quickly.

• Other teams don’t agree with your new customer journey?

You can prevent this in the first place by following my suggestion above and including other teams in the journey mapping process. Any team with a stake in the journey will respond much more positively to a plan they helped to create. I would recommend choosing a small, cross-functional team to design the journey, and then have each person surface it to their team and report back to the group on any challenges or push-back. Then, you can tackle those issues together. By working cross-functionally you’ll have the support of your peers as you roll out the plan, which will make it much more successful.

• You don’t have all the tools to execute on the journey you have planned?

First, make sure you truly understand the functionality of the tools you do have. For example, let’s say you’re using Hubspot to manage customers, but you need an emailing tool. Hubspot has that functionality, and there may even be a team in your company already using it. This brings me to my second suggestion, which is to ask around about the solutions other teams are using. Sometimes another team might have a tool that is ideal for what you need. It is usually less expensive to add licenses than to buy a whole new system.

Finally, if you really do need a new tool, be prepared to build a business case for it. More on how to do that in one of my future articles but start thinking about the benefits so you’re ready to go.

As you move through segmentation and journey mapping, know that these foundational elements of your customer success program will become easier to manage year over year. It is worth putting in the time to get them right as you’re planning for 2025 so that all the other pieces of your program smoothly align with both your company’s goals and your customer’s needs.

Good luck with your 2025 planning!

Need more specific direction? The Success League is a boutique customer success consulting firm. Our Segmentation and Journey Mapping consulting services can help! For more on these and our other offerings, visit TheSuccessLeague.io

Kristen Hayer - Kristen founded The Success League in 2015 and currently serves as the company's CEO. Over the past 25 years Kristen has been a success, sales, and marketing executive, primarily working with scaling tech companies, and leading several award-winning customer success teams. She has written over 100 articles on customer success, and is the host of 3 podcasts about the field. Kristen has served as a judge for the Customer Success Excellence awards, and is on the board of several early-stage tech companies. She received her MBA from the University of Washington in Seattle, and now lives in San Francisco.